An incident in Kurow

My fascination with graffiti has been with me from an early age. When I first encountered it, the words literally being applied to landscape had a brutal honesty to them; an honesty that spoke in loud fluorescent capitals and swore like a bastard. At its worst graffiti is a futile attempt at egotism; at best it is a hole torn in the thin veneer of respectability. Graffiti is a view of the unspoken machinery that whirs behind the wall of civilisation, the wall that keeps us in our quiet little lives. Moments that allow us to see behind this thin veneer are rare. They are often caught out of the corner of our eye as we speed down a motorway, or are muttered in the quiet halls of an art gallery: a small comment that opens the heavens and, like good poetry, takes us apart and puts us back differently.
Such is my fascination for this stuff that I went fishing for it in the small North Otago town of Kurow. It was – and still is – an unassuming sort of place that has a lot going for it: a population of around four hundred, two pubs, one dairy and a petrol station-garage that will fix almost anything. Like most communities, it wears its civility as a thin coat, threadbare in places. It is the youth who carry the torch of honesty, poking their fingers through the threadbare bits and telling you how it is.
One year when I was there I quietly removed a graffiti-covered Pinus radiata plank off a public picnic bench near the town’s main street. I duly replaced it with a nice clean new one. The picnic bench to which it was attached had the right mix of prominence and privacy, and proximity to a fish and chip shop. The new plank was, I hoped, a blank canvas slipped under the nose of the town’s youth, tempting them to tell me how it is, daring them to take me apart and put me back differently.
A year on, I headed back to see what had become of the plank, to see what the weather and the young people’s knives had recorded on its smooth blank face.
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On the way there from Banks Peninsula I passed through my old university town. On an obscure lamppost not far from the pub was written, ‘Mad mad AnDy’ in faded but still garish red paint. It has been there for as long as I remember, a sort of gauge of my own youth slipping by. AnDy has probably long since settled for a comfortable middle-class existence of family and farm and the news on telly at six. Back then, he could well have been drunk on a Monday morning while in possession of a pot of red paint and brush.
It was while attending university that I first became aware of the kind of graffiti that pokes holes in civilisation. It was more piercing than just mad AnDy’s rants telling me I was getting old, and came in the form of honest and open critique. During my wanderings amongst the university’s extensive art collection, displayed on the walls of some of its newer buildings, I came across comments that had been carefully printed over the labels accompanying the works. Under an enormous painting of a decapitated sheep’s head someone had written, ‘This is bloody tacky.’ Under another painting depicting a surrealist zoo, someone had noted, ‘Haven of the bourgeoisie.’ The more I looked the more commentary I found.
Scathing critique of this kind was a constant in the life of painter Colin McCahon. As history would have it, he made two visits to Kurow to teach summer school for painters in 1971–72. While the locals may not have paid much attention to him and his students, he was a great exponent of text in his paintings. Over the course of his career McCahon attracted much public derision for his use of words; many people called them the scribbles and rants of an artistic vandal.
At its source was a childhood epiphany as he watched a signwriter paint on a tobacconist’s window. It manifested itself in a fascination for the white, handpainted roadside fonts of butchers’ windows and orchardists’ boards. Their honesty, lack of a proper canvas and occasionally eccentric grammar captured something in the young artist. The simple expression of words in white paint from a shaky hand is a very human expression. The mistakes and wiggles tell us something of the creator that is lost in formal typography and, these days, spell- checked computer-generated print.
McCahon quoted prophetic texts and transposed the ideas contained in them onto the New Zealand landscape. They took the form of comic book-style speech bubbles and altered biblical quotations, giving expression to the uniqueness of this young bicultural colony. The collision of the gospel with New Zealand’s primal landscape and cultural makeup produced some ingenious reactions that ranged from blinding brilliance to melancholic absurdity.
The students who attended McCahon’s summer schools in Kurow remember him as a thin, reticent man who gave his all to his students regardless of their abilities. Public ridicule of his work went straight to his warm heart, and the wounds stayed open and ragged on their edges even into the afterlife.
Perhaps McCahon’s most sweeping statement in text was discovered in his locked studio after his death. His last painting, I considered all the acts of oppression, was found lying face down on the floor by his son. The quoted text was from Ecclesiastes, and it was full of all the hopelessness and rage that shimmers around the best graffiti and some of the best art. No one could offer an open critique of this work; the artist had beaten them to it.
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Approaching Kurow across its most famous rickety bridge I was confronted with a foreboding at what I would find on my plank. As they were for McCahon, the wounds of today’s youth are open and ragged on the edges. But I bought my obligatory fish and chips, and sat down on the picnic bench to read. Amid the rages against acts of oppression, and lying squarely between ‘ShiT hoLe’ and ‘thiS plaCe is a duMp’, lay one sentence.
It said, ‘I❤️U.’
Taken with kind permission from the splendid new book Innerland: A journey through the everyday landscape of New Zealand by Matt Vance (Potton & Burton, $39.99), available in bookstores nationwide. The author pokes his nose at the things around us – park benches, malls, mudflats and modest suburbs – in this portrait of New Zealand life and landscape.